Explore the Grand Canyon With Google Street View

The Google Maps team went to the Grand Canyon and snapped more than 9,500 images to create a Street View map of the national park. After four months of stitching all those high-resolution pics together, the company’s Street View maps of the Canyon are live and ready to be clicked through.

“We’re really happy with the way all the images came out,” said Ryan Falor, a Google Maps product manager. “We had tested Trekker for a long time, but in reality we weren’t super sure that this would all work especially considering the lighting conditions, the early start, and all that.”

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The Grand Canyon was the maiden voyage for Google’s Trekker — a backpack-like camera that takes 75-megapixel photos and weighs 40-pounds. Jutting out of the pack is an orb that houses a cluster 15 lenses, which shoot a 360-degree photo every 2.5 seconds. The device is controlled by a Google-built app on an Android smartphone, of course, and its linked to the pack via USB. The pack houses a custom built image sensor, and hot swappable solid-state hard drives to store the photos. To put it plainly, the Trekker is made up of the shrunken essentials found in one of the company’s famous Street View cars, trikes and snowmobiles.

Since Falor and his colleagues didn’t know exactly how the hike into the Canyon, much less how the photo collection would go, the team took three Trekker packs and six people (two Googlers per Trekker) on the journey. They also had a handful of folks who didn’t hike but provided remote support. The Trekker packs were up to the rigors of the hike, and nothing broke. That convinced the team that more trips would be worthwhile.

“There’s always the compromise we have to make between the quality of the images, and the speed at which we capture images, and the size of the images that we serve, and the price of the cameras that we use,” Falor told Wired. “With the Grand Canyon trip, all of that came together nicely. So yeah, we’re thinking of where we can take Trekker next, what’s possible in the future.”

Among Google’s aspirations for Trekker include all of the U.S. national parks, landmarks all over the world, ancient ruins and archeological sites, and even remote cities and villages that are difficult if not impossible to reach by car.

“We don’t have our next stop hammered down yet, but we certainly want to take Trekker to every country that we’re doing Street View in,” Falor said. “We want to take Trekker to the most amazing places in the world, everywhere people want to go and see, and all sorts of places that most people don’t even know exist.”